ZTE Open is the first phone based on Mozilla’s Firefox operating system and the company has officially announced that it will sell it via eBay. Who needs a sales channel when you can use eBay that should serve the purpose well enough?

The phone will sell for $79.99 (£59.99 in the eBay UK store) and it comes with Nokia HERE maps as well as modest 3.5-inch HVGA 480x320 TFT display and a 3.15-megapixel camera. The CPU comes from Qualcomm, it is a single core MSM7225A A5 processor with UMTS support that will suffice for most.

The phone will come in traditional Firefox color as it will make its debut in the UK market on the Orange network, but the price of £59.99 is for an unlocked phone. You can see on demo on a YouTube of the phone running the Firefox OS and how it works. The price is really modest and it can fight the android in the lower market segment. Lack of apps will be the problem for the time being, but at least the phone is cheap and if offers basic smartphone functionality.

The phone is currently bidding on the UK website and sells for £73.01 with almost four more days left which makes absolutely no sense, but it at least indicates that the phone wont ship before late this week or probably later. You can bid for the first one here. You can get more official details on the official page here.

Geeksphone has announced that it has started to take pre-orders for its new Peak+ Firefox OS powered smartphone. Although it is just a minor upgrade when compared to its previos Peak smartphone aimed at developers, the Peak+ packs decent specs and will be available for consumers with a rather affordable €149,00 price tag.

As noted, the new Geeksphone Peak+ is just a minor update over the original Peak as it features the same 4.3-inch 960x540 IPS screen and powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8225 S4 chipset powered by a dual-core Cortex-A5 CPU part clocked at 1.2GHz and paired up with Adreno 203 GPU. It still has 4GB of storage expandable via microSD card slot, 8-megapixel rear camera with flash, 2 megapixel front camera and a 1800mAh battery.

On the other hand, it did get 1GB of RAM which is double the amount on original Peak and uses a new exterior material that is better to the touch, according to Geeksphone. It also comes with Firefox OS 1.1 out of the box, the same update that both Peak and Keon recently received.

The Peak+ will be available for pre-order at Geeksphone site with a promotional price of €149 (around US $200). Geeksphone noted that the price will go up a bit once initial batch is sold but did not specify it. The pre-ordered units should ship out in September.

Foxconn is apparently taking Firefox OS quite seriously. The manufacturer is planning to hire 2,000 to 3,000 developers to bolster its Firefox OS team, which sounds like a veritable army.

The skill set Foxconn is after is not surprising. It is looking for software engineers with experience in HTML 5 operating systems, HTML5 apps and cloud computing. The vacancies seem to be centred on Taiwan. Suicide prone candidates need not apply.

Foxconn is said to be working on more than five Firefox OS devices, which should cover all major market segments. Although the Firefox OS ecosystem is still dwarfed by Android and iOS, things could change if the new OS is backed by the likes of Foxconn.

It seems that Foxconn is no longer content with building Android and iOS gear for other brands, it wants to become a consumer brand in its own right and Firefox OS is its platform of choice.

Samsung will not embrace Mozilla’s new mobile OS and it will not launch any devices based on Firefox OS.

Several mobile players have already confirmed that they will launch Firefox OS handsets. These include big names such as LG, ZTE, Huawei, Sony and Alcatel. However, Samsung is apparently willing to leave Firefox OS to smaller players.

However, Firefox OS devices won’t show up anytime soon. The first phones are expected in the second quarter, but widespread availability could be months away. Sony’s Firefox phone will arrive in 2014.

With Android, iOS, BB10 and WP8 all competing in an overcrowded market, we’re not sure there is any room for yet another mobile platform. Still, the Mozilla crew could surprise us.

The mobile OS market is really heating up and Mozilla certainly wants a piece of it with its Firefox OS. The outfit unveiled its two new developer smartphones developed in partnership with Spanish Geeksphone.

It is quite clear that Mozilla is not aiming at the high-end smartphone market as Keon and Peak prove. The Keon is based on single-core Snapdragon CPU running at 1GHz which is placed behind a 480x320 touchscreen and paired up with 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage space and 3-megapixel camera. It also comes with microSD card slot, light, proximity, and G-sensor, GPS, 802.11bgn WiFi and 1580mAh battery.

The Peak turns the specifications up a notch with a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 CPU, 4.3-inch qHD 960x540 IPS touchscreen, 2-megapixel front and 8-megapixel rear camera with flash. On the other hand, it also comes with 512MB of RAM and same 4GB of storage space. The rest of the specs are pretty much the same but it does come with a 1800mAh battery.

Unfortunately, there is still no information regarding the actual release date or the price, but we are quite sure that these were not exactly designed to burn a hole in anyone wallet making them quite interesting in our book.

ZTE and Mozillla are working hard to bring the first Firefox OS based smartphone to South America and eventually Europe.

Unfortunately, there are not many precise details regarding the actual specs of the smartphone but it is currently known that the company is currently in talks with an unknown European carrier. According to Cheng Lixin, CEO of ZTE USA, the company might unveil the same smartphone is the US sa well, depending on the demand and interest. It is still early to talk about specs but we are pretty sure that more info will surface by the end of February once Mobile World Congress 2013 kicks off in Barcelona.

Firefox OS will first appear on entry-level smartphones and it will try to rock the Android boat. If ZTE manages to get at least a tiny spark of interest, we are quite sure that most, if not all, manufacturers would follow, although we doubt that it might actually hurt Google's market dominance.